Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extrajudicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012 according to a recent study. This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours. The report notes that it's possible that the real number could be much higher.

The U.S. hasn't come very far since the days of lynchings.

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Along with the rate of extrajudicial killings, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report contains other important findings. Of the 313 killed, 124 (40%) were between 22 and 31 years old, 57 (18%) were between 18 and 21 years old, 54 (17%) were between 32 and 41 years old, 32 (10%) were 42 to 51 years old, 25 (8%) were children younger than 18 years old, 18 (6%) were older than 52, and 3 (1%) were of unknown ages.

A significant portion of those killed, 68 people or 22%, suffered from mental health issues and/or were self-medicated. The study says that "[m]any of them might be alive today if community members trained and committed to humane crisis intervention and mental health treatment had been called, rather than the police."

43% of the shootings occurred after an incident of racial profiling. This means police saw a person who looked or behaved "suspiciously" largely because of their skin color and attempted to detain the suspect before killing them. Other times, the shootings occurred during a criminal investigation (24%), after 9-1-1 calls from "emotionally disturbed loved ones" (19%) or because of domestic violence (7%), or innocent people were killed for no reason (7%).

Biased propaganda from the Malcom X Grassroots Movement. Not one mention of the circumstances surrounding any of these 313 "extrajudicial" killings. Luckily some of the incidents in the study were posted in the comments section. I wouldn't categorize these as "lynchings."

"Lawrence stabbed an officer to death as officer was moving him from police car to Mobile County Metro Jail for booking on a robbery charge at a Dollar Store. After the stabbing, Lawrence fled in the patrol car, shot and wounded a second officer who gave chase and finally killed Lawrence."

"Jones argued with a bus driver over validity of a transit pass. Driver reported him to a Transit Officer at the Arapaho Station. When transit officer approached , Jones allegedly started shooting. She returned fire. A bystander was killed and the transit officer and another bystander were wounded."

"Burton allegedly robbed a Jamaican restaurant of $200 at gunpoint. As he was running away from police, he discharged his weapon and escaped. Then he carjacked a vehicle and jumped out of it while it was moving resulting in the car crashing into a house. Burton finally barricaded himself in his sister's house. A SWAT team failed at negotiating his surrender. A shootout resulted in his death."

"In the course of a drug bust, Lawrence was ordered to drop his weapon, an AK-47. When he did not, the sheriff shot him twice."

There’s no question that relative to their population, black Americans hold a disproportionate share of arrests and convictions for crime. But it’s important we don’t confuse that with a propensity for crime. Put another way, black overrepresentation in crime statistics has as much to do with policing and the legal process as it does with the actual crimes committed.

. . .

Bystanders would catch two other instances of police violence over the next week. In the first, an officer is seen stomping on the head of a man arrested for marijuana possession, and in the second, an officer is shown using a chokehold on a pregnant woman after she grilled food on the sidewalk outside of her home (which, apparently, is against the law in New York City).

The reason for these stops is a policing approach called “broken windows,” first articulated by scholars James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly essay and later adopted by the NYPD in 1993. Broken windows prioritizes cracking down on minor offenses on the theory that doing so can preempt serious crime. Or, to use the metaphor of the idea, actual broken windows create the appearance of disorder, which creates actual disorder as criminals take advantage of the inviting environment. Rather than wait for the serious crimes to begin, police should “repair the windows”—focus on petty crime like loitering, and you’ll stop the worse crime from taking hold.

It’s an elegant concept, but there’s little evidence it works.

. . .

Under “broken windows,” these biases take center stage. They inform police conduct and lead to situations where blacks and Latinos face the brunt of aggressive policing. Odds are good that a group of black kids hanging out on a stoop will look more suspicious to police, regardless of their behavior. A recent analysis bears this out. According to the New York Daily News, which combed through recent police data from the city, blacks and Latinos account for the vast majority (81 percent) of the 7.3 million police summonses issued under broken windows since 2001.

These citations are minor—“consumption of alcohol on streets” and “bicycle on sidewalk”—but they produce frequent (and potentially dangerous) police encounters. For millions of black and Latino New Yorkers, the city is a literal police state, where officers patrol for papers and detain individuals on the slightest suspicion of illegal conduct.

Now compare this with banks such as HSBC, which are allowed to traffic drugs and fund terrorism with only financial repercussions.

The police are getting very aggressive. I'll speculate on a couple reasons:

1) steroid use (and other PED's). Roid rage is a real thing and guys who use heaps of gear are not more angry all the time but very quick to become irate and overreact. We probably don't want police to be geared-up monsters with short tempers.

2) the hiring of military vets from Iraq and Afghanistan, who cut their teeth as an occupying military and have brought home the attitude. Add to this the military equipment that the DOD and DHS gives away to police department. Why small towns need trucks designed to survive roadside bombs in Baghdad is far beyond me.

The police are getting very aggressive. I'll speculate on a couple reasons:

1) steroid use (and other PED's). Roid rage is a real thing and guys who use heaps of gear are not more angry all the time but very quick to become irate and overreact. We probably don't want police to be geared-up monsters with short tempers.

2) the hiring of military vets from Iraq and Afghanistan, who cut their teeth as an occupying military and have brought home the attitude. Add to this the military equipment that the DOD and DHS gives away to police department. Why small towns need trucks designed to survive roadside bombs in Baghdad is far beyond me.

No, its not a new phenomona. The only difference today is that we live in an electronic media and its more visible. When did cops, etc. ever stop shooting minorities? Can anyone ever tell me when it stopped after the civil rights movement and then started again? No, its always been that way in numerous communities. More light on it now. Even when standards were higher it was bad.
Also, its not just blacks. Blacks and latinos and to some extent poor whites (trailer types) were easy pickings. No one batted an eye. Nowadays its everyone.
Google "police brutality' plus any niche. 'elderly', 'soccer mom', 'co-ed' etc. and you'll find plenty of videos of cops all over the country abusing groups they never did before: middle america.
I recall one video of a college campus where the team was involved in a sports game, could be a bowl game or march madness. Students in the streets, etc. These are college kids and its common. Go to Michigan State, Florida State, etc. and its a common site. Anyway, this one girl. White college co-ed, simply walking with her ear phones on and a cop out of nowhere just rushes her like a lineman and bulldozes her over a bench. She was unaware and thank God someone got it on video. Crazy.

The FACT is since 911 and the Patriots Act, American cops have gotten more brazen. They feel they have the right to go after ALL of us now. Police departments have gotten military equipment. They are now armed with armored tank like vehicles even in small towns. Its reminiscent of a police state. Not even China and I've been there, do the cops have this kind of stuff.

Those numbers above are reflective of the groups that have gotten the brunt of it. 80% of drug related arrests for blacks are for personal use amounts of pot. Even though studies find that pot use is pretty much the same as whites. Cops target that group more. On my campus, all the dorms and frat houses had pot. Cops know they are there and smoking it and could easily go into any major schools dorms and frat row on a Friday and Saturday night and find any assortment of illegal drugs but they don't because of the blowback. In the past you don't touch middle class America, any social changes in America doesn't happen until middle america says it does.

Cops in the inner city and minority areas instigate a lot of it. Stop and frisk and they sometimes use abusive language to instigate things and then they get an excuse to use force.

Michael Brown didn’t die in the dark. He was eighteen years old, walking down a street in Ferguson, Missouri, from his apartment to his grandmother’s, at 2:15 on a bright Saturday afternoon. He was, for a young man, exactly where he should be—among other things, days away from his first college classes. A policeman stopped him; it’s not clear why. People in the neighborhood have told reporters that they remember what happened next as a series of movements: the officer, it seemed to them, trying to put Brown into a car; Brown running with his hands in the air; the policeman shooting; Brown falling. The next morning, Jon Belmar, the police chief of St. Louis County, which covers Ferguson, was asked, at a press conference, how many times Brown had been shot. Belmar said that he wasn’t sure: “more than just a couple of times, but not much more.” When counting bullets, “just” and “not much more” are odd words to choose.

The details are still emerging, but there seem to be two irreconcilable versions of events. Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson tells of a police officer, who has yet to be named, confronting the two of them for the offense of walking in the street rather than on the sidewalk, and then starting a fight with Brown, who held his hands up in compliance, before shooting him dead in the street. The police have said that Brown was shot in response to a struggle for the officer’s gun. The police department, citing threats made through social media, has steadfastly refused to release the name of the officer involved in the shooting. The F.B.I. has announced a federal investigation. On Tuesday, the White House released a statement of condolence to Brown’s family.

. . .

The truth is that you’ve read this story so often that the race-tinged death story has become a genre itself, the details plugged into a grim template of social conflict. The genre is defined by its tendency toward an unsatisfactory resolution of the central problems. Two years ago, I visited St. Louis to give a talk at a museum. My visit fell in the wake of a rally in which hundreds of local residents turned out to demand an arrest in Martin’s death. (Brown’s family has now retained Benjamin Crump, the attorney who represented Martin’s family.) Martin was killed nearly a thousand miles away, but when I spoke to people about the rally they conveyed the sense that what had happened to him could happen anywhere in the country, even in their own back yards. For those people in Ferguson pressed against the yellow police tape separating them from Brown’s remains, the overwhelming sentiment is that it already has.

HHHmmmmm. It appears that the "innocent teen" was involved in a strong arm robbery and assaulted the police officer that shot him. Will wonders never cease?

Hmmm, it took the police how many days to come out with that "news"?? And as if a petty crime involving no weapon justifies the cop's actions. What a load of crap. I wouldn't be surprised if the two had nothing to do with one another. Cops just found the video and decided to use that as an explanation for the officer's action.

Edit: police chief stated cop didn't know anything about the robbery. So yep, those events indeed had nothing to do with one another.

^ I believe the police story is that the black guy was approached by the cop for another reason - and assumed it was for the robbery - a struggle started and he reached for the sidearm and is now dead. This is not implausible. It is more plausible than "defenseless black teen (6-4, 200+lbs, adult male, just robbed store, probably gang member) randomly shot by cops for being black".

Strong arm robbery is a FELONY. Assault on a police officer is a FELONY. These are hardly "petty crimes". I sincerely hope YOU are subjected to a strong arm robbery. I'm 100% sure YOU wouldn't consider it a "petty crime"

It is a normal, daily occurrence in St. Louis for multiple (as in many, more than one, in separate incidents) blacks to be killed by blacks. No riots, etc. It's so stupid. Who cares anyway. This guy was a criminal and America is better off that he's dead and not able to rob and breed.

Have you ever noticed how in election years, some local police blotter item that can be spun as supposedly proving a vast national crisis of white racist violence against innocent blacks seem to become the most important new event of the century for awhile?

For example, in 2006 there was the Duke Lacrosse Case, in 2012 12-year old Trayvon Martin was wantonly gunned down by a white man from across the street, and in 2014 there’s Ferguson, MO, a place I have to admit to never having heard of before this month.

It’s almost as if the national media and the Democratic Party naturally work together to try to boost black turnout in November by stoking racial hatred against whites.

Vaguely sensing that they’ve screwed up massively, the press is trying to spin the news as being about the insensitivity of the police releasing such inappropriate video

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Here we’ve been hearing all these days about the innocent child, and instead we see an NFL-sized galoot throwing his weight around in a truly hostile and stupid manner. Does he not know that convenience stores in 2014 all have security cameras and that somebody as gigantic as himself couldn’t get away with his crime by claiming it was really somebody else on the video?

Perhaps the cop he ran into a few minutes later was equally hostile and stupid.

But looking at these pictures I have to feel sorry for the cop and the situation he was headed into.

And I roll my eyes once again that America’s best and brightest mediaocrities have been suckered once again by a Wolfean P of S story.

America has gotten so racist that a black can't steal some cigars, assault the owner of the place he's robbing and reach for a cops gun in peace.